No. 2502

Garnishing of Eggs a la Develle

Garniture d'Oeufs a la Develle

Cut in two crossways seven or eight shelled hard-boiled eggs; use only the halves with the rounded ends and from them remove all the yolks and rub through a sieve; put this into a small vessel and add to it a little cold aspic jelly (No. 103); (scoop the whites out lightly). Pound the cooked meats of a small lobster, press through a sieve into a bowl and season with salt and a dash of cayenne; add first two spoonfuls of white chaudfroid sauce (No.596), then some mayonnaise sauce (No.606), and lastly a few spoonfuls of the cold jelly; stir this preparation on ice to harden, then take up sufficient of it with a spoon and fill the hollow egg-whites, smoothing the tops dome-shaped; lay them in the ice box; when cold take them in the hand one by one and dip into a chaudfroid sauce, but only on the garnished side and as far down as this begins; have the sauce hardened. Dress on jelly rings cut out with a pastry cutter, keeping the dish very cold. When the eggs are ready decorate the tops with fanciful cuts of truffles and a few small shrimp tails; dip them one by one in half-set jelly and stand them upright, each one inside of one of the jelly rings.

← No. 2501 Garnishing of Artichoke Bottoms, Imperial Garnishings for Cold Dishes No. 2503 Garnishing of Eggs a la Jardiniere →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is a cold-buffet garnish from a nineteenth-century professional kitchen: stuffed egg halves coated in chaudfroid and set on discs of aspic. Everything hinges on temperature — each layer must be at the point of setting when it goes on, and the finished pieces must never warm up.

The hinge: coating temperatureChaudfroid and aspic coat properly only in a narrow window, when the gelatin has cooled and just begins to thicken to the consistency of thin cream. Too warm and it runs off the egg; too cool and it goes lumpy and streaked. Set the bowl of sauce over ice water, stir constantly, and re-warm gently over a water bath as soon as it stiffens.
Cross-references you must make firstNos. 103, 596 and 606 are Ranhofer's aspic jelly, white chaudfroid and mayonnaise. All three have to exist before you start — the aspic in particular needs several hours to clarify and chill, so plan it a day ahead.
"Ice box" and "very cold"Read every instance as the refrigerator, and take the insistence seriously. These pieces spend a long time in the hand being dipped and decorated; work in small batches, returning the tray to the fridge between stages, and serve on a chilled platter.
Raw-egg mayonnaiseThe mayonnaise here is never cooked and the finished garnish sits out on a buffet. Use pasteurized eggs or a good commercial mayonnaise, and keep total time at room temperature under two hours.
Ambiguous measures"Two spoonfuls" and "a few spoonfuls" are eye measures — Ranhofer expected a cook who could judge by consistency. Start with about 2 tablespoons chaudfroid to the sieved meat of one small lobster, then add mayonnaise and aspic a spoonful at a time until the mixture is thick enough to hold a dome on a spoon.
LobsterA one-pound lobster yields roughly 3-4 oz of picked meat, enough for this quantity. Pounding in a mortar and forcing through a sieve is what produces the smooth paste; a food processor plus a fine strainer does the same work faster.
Gelatin strengthNineteenth-century aspic was set with reduced veal or calf's-foot stock and behaves differently from modern sheet or powdered gelatin. Test a spoonful of your jelly on a cold plate first: it should be firm enough to cut cleanly with a pastry cutter but not rubbery.
Truffles and shrimpFresh truffle is optional extravagance here — the point is a dark, precise silhouette against pale sauce. Thin discs of black olive or blanched leek greens cut with an aspic cutter read the same way. The "shrimp tails" are simply small peeled cooked shrimp.
YieldSeven or eight eggs give seven or eight garnished halves, since only the rounded ends are used. The leftover pointed halves and surplus yolk mixture go into another dish; a cook plating a large cold buffet would use these as one element among several.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of what is usually given as some three decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and this entry belongs to a long series of garnishes whose entire purpose was to make a cold platter look architectural. Chaudfroid — literally "hot-cold," a sauce made hot and served cold, thickened with gelatin so it clings as an opaque coat — was the defining technique of the grand buffet in the decades after Carême, and aspic did the structural work that a mould or a stand does elsewhere. The suffix à la Develle is one of hundreds of proper-name tags in the book, such tags being commonly said to commemorate a patron, a colleague or an occasion whose identity Ranhofer did not bother to record; no documented origin for this one survives. What the recipe really shows is the labour available in a large restaurant kitchen of the period: a single decorative egg passes through sieve, mortar, ice bath, two dippings and a cutter before it reaches the platter, where it is one small unit in a display meant to be admired before it was eaten.